Home Engineer: Our source of happiness

Grandmother

Most people assume our bundles of joy are our most significant source of merriment.

Photo credit: Pool | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • Most people assume our bundles of joy are our most significant source of merriment.
  • We have celebrated with utter fulfilment and gaiety various stages of our children’s growth. Crawling – walking and chasing.

The world celebrated the International Day of Happiness on March 20, 2021. This year’s theme was Happiness for All, Forever. With the global pandemic in our midst, it is sad to admit, but ‘happiness’ has had its limits tried and tested; and that’s why this day probably slipped away silently. As mothers, our happiness is a culmination of numerous day to day achievements. Most people assume our bundles of joy are our most significant source of merriment. We have celebrated with utter fulfilment and gaiety various stages of our children’s growth. Crawling – walking and chasing. Teething – chewing and biting. Baby’s first words – cute jargon and noise. The call of nature – diaper changes and potty training. Each stage comes and passes with a myriad of challenges, and when we succeed in creating a human out of a primitive creature otherwise born just like a cave dweller, we rejoice! But, while we are happy that our babies are being molded into respectable beings, could we slowly forget that for this happiness to exist today, there is a past that led us to the existential environment we reside in today? Let’s take a step back.


We were once children too, and our relationship with our parents brought us joy to the point where we began to feel we needed them less. Despite all the joys our parents or caregivers bestowed upon us, the devil instigated a calculated and innate feeling of selfishness within us, which suddenly began to breed a void of emptiness, loneliness and need. We began to yearn for partners and lovers, and when we found those we thought were the right ones, the indisposed feeling of happiness from our parent’s quarters was once again reinvigorated, albeit by a different person in our lives this time. Eventually, some of us got married, and we began to feel our contentment needed a slight boost once more, and that’s when our own children were ceremoniously conceived.


Joyful gift

Parenthood is as much a festive gift that life gives us as it is painful, frustrating, tiring and overwhelming. With time as our children grow up, our priorities begin to change. We begin to wish they get married, so we can, in turn, join the bandwagon of in-laws and subsequently the grandparent’s roller coaster. Socially, our happiness cycle ends here. A point where we no longer wish to add on any more individuals to our lives to attain or increase our happiness levels. A feeling of contentment that needs no further optimisation.


So what does this all mean? It means as human beings and in particular as mothers, we derive happiness not only from within ourselves but from the juxtaposition of other beings, whose lives interconnect with our own, to articulate the feeling of joy that lies within us from the moment we are born. It shows us that we are all born happy, and as life goes on, we are inoculated with some form of happiness by existing people in our lives, and as the cycle keeps turning around, we begin to pass on this joy to those whom we give life to. This bartering of giving and receiving happiness continues till the end of our lives. This is what can be called happiness for all and whose cycle truly goes on forever. So, the next time one of the rug rats throws a tantrum spewed with hate, please draw this circle of happiness and remind them that they too are on a mere journey and what goes around comes around – literally!